People use Facebook to share and connect, including staying current on the latest news, whether it’s about their favorite celebrity or what’s happening in the world. We’ve noticed that people enjoy seeing articles on Facebook, and so we’re now paying closer attention to what makes for high quality content, and how often articles are clicked on from News Feed on mobile. What this means is that you may start to notice links to articles a little more often (particularly on mobile).

Alfred Hermida, associate professor at University of British Columbia, gave the keynote address at the Journalism Education Association of Australia annual conference on December 3, 2013, in Mooloolaba, Queensland, Australia:

When facts are fluid: Emerging best practices to verify information on social media

More than half of the people coming to major news sites are using mobile devices. As journalists, we can’t ignore how much this changes the experience of our readers and viewers as well as the way we produce and distribute our work. What should we be thinking about in the midst of this change?

Mobile: Coming to a desert, a village, a megacity near you, courtesy of Vodafone.

Kaitlin Godbey, social media strategist with the Bureau of Land Management,(@godbeywithyou), rides a Google bike at the Google headquarters in October, 2012.

Kaitlin Godbey, social media and content strategist for the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada, will join us Tuesday to talk about how she manages social media to interact with the public. You can read about Kaitlin on her About.me page (and while you’re there, check out the About.me site; some of you might find it a useful platform for posting your resumes and portfolios). She is also president of Ad2Reno, for young advertising professionals in Reno.

What ethical questions might you face while using social media as a professional journalist?

It’s important to recognize that even as a student journalist, once you publish online, you’re indistinguishable from a professional journalist: your words and works are held to the same ethical and legal standards as a professional journalist. Paul Bradshaw wrote about this recently: There’s no such thing as a ‘student journalist’. You are responsible for making sure your words are accurate, that you’ve used attribution, triple checked your facts and thought carefully about the ethical implications of your actions. You don’t have an editor standing over you when you tweet, post and comment.

As journalists spend more and more time in online social spaces, news organizations are crafting guidelines to help them calibrate their behavior. Some news organizations, like the Journal Register Company, give journalists wide leeway:

Dan Gillmor provides a little more guidance in his column in the Guardian:

1) Be human.
2) Be honorable.
3) Don’t embarrass us.

Other organizations have much more extensive guidelines: NPR, for example and the Washington Post.

Thinking in advance about how to reason through various questions helps prepare you for on-the-job dilemmas:

As a journalist, what can you ethically use in a news story that you glean from social networks? (See the Annie Le case)

Miller believes that the audience looking for news that’s longer than a tweet but shorter than an article is being underserved. “There’s a little pie of people who are interested in reading a New York Times article on the shutdown,” he says. “We think there’s a much, much larger pie that is interested in the government shutdown but doesn’t find any of those articles that approachable.” Ultimately, he wants Potluck to offer just enough information to generate conversation.

As Copyblogger notes, the first step to getting people to read or watch what you’ve created is to write a great headline. If your headline doesn’t convince people to click, you’ve already lost them. This is your first interaction, the first moment of connection you have with a real live reader. So plan it as carefully as you would meeting someone cool on a blind date.

A headline is also key to making your content findable. People click, search and browse to find the content they are looking for. Being conscious about the keywords and phrases you use will help make your work more findable by search engines and by people. Study the keywords that people use to find your blog (Example: Viterbo, Italy blog)

Understanding your audience is key. Who are you writing to? Being specific to your audience will make your words more compelling than if written to a general, mass audience.

Another way to improve your headlines is to study them. Pay attention to what catches your eye and why. When you’re stuck, browse your favorite publications and look for ideas.

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Software Tutorials

You have free access to the Lynda.com tutorials which provide in-depth software instruction for just about any program you could want for this class. Go to the Knowledge Center website and click on Research Databases.